Lucilla Bonaccorsi: It Girl, It Trend

The fashion world prodigy fulfills her destiny.

When she was 8 years old, Lucilla Bonaccorsi had her first major runway moment, closing her mother Luisa Beccaria’s haute couture presentation wearing a gold brocade dress and ballerina flats, a flower tucked into her hair. Now, as a codesigner of the dreamy ultrafeminine brand, the 30-year-old takes a bow with her mom at the end of the Luisa Beccaria ready-to-wear shows. “It was in my blood,” Bonaccorsi says of her fashion destiny. “I didn’t have any questions.”

The oldest of five children to Beccaria and her Sicilian aristocrat husband, Lucio Bonaccorsi, Lucilla was born and raised in Milan, where from a young age she would lie on the carpet in her mother’s atelier and watch her work. She spent vacations at her family’s 18th-century castle, Castelluccio, near Noto in Sicily—a fantasia surrounded by olive and orange groves and almond trees. Large celebrations called for glamorous dresses from Beccaria’s children’s line, like the red velvet number with taffeta bows she wore one Christmas. “I felt like a princess,” Bonaccorsi remembers.

Fairy-tale dresses aside, when Lucilla joined the family company, at 21, she rolled up her sleeves, learning about every facet of the business—from patternmaking to production to press relations. And while she has been contemplating starting her own line, she doesn’t plan to stray far from home. “It could have my name,” she says of her idea for a more affordable, street- savvy variation on her mother’s romantic look. “But it’s stronger to have it be a part of the main brand. There are so many things you can create within one aesthetic. In the end, you sell a dream.”